Manifold: Space

by Stephen Baxter

  And at the last, she saw the greatest comet of all tear itself from the heart of this Land, a ball of fire that lunged into the sky, receding rapidly into the unyielding Dark.

  She fell toward that glowing ocean, her heart full of joy at the Merging of the Lands.

  In the last moment of her life, she recalled the Giver.

  She was the first, and the Giver birthed her. None of it would have come to be without the Giver, who fed the Land.

  She wished she could express her love for him. She knew that was impossible.

  She sensed, though, that he knew anyhow.

  Chapter 21

  Homecoming

  After their journey to the stars, Madeleine and Ben returned to a silent Solar System.

  Over a century had elapsed. They themselves had aged less than a year. It was now, astonishingly, the year 2240, an unimaginable, futuristic date. Madeleine had been braced for more historic drift, more cultural isolation.

  Not for silence.

  As the long weeks of their flight inward from the Saddle Point radius wore away, and the puddle of crowded light that was the inner system grew brighter ahead, they both grew increasingly apprehensive. At length, they were close enough to resolve images of Earth in the Ancestor's telescopes. They huddled together by their monitors.

  What they saw was an Earth that was brilliant white.

  Ice swept down from both poles, encroaching toward the equator. The shapes of the northern continents were barely visible under the huge frozen sheets. The colors of life, brown and green and blue, had been crowded into a narrow strip around the equator. Here and there, easily visible on the night side of the planet, Madeleine made out the spark of fires, of explosions. Gaijin ships orbited Earth, tracking from pole to pole, their ramscoops casting golden light that glimmered from the ice and the oceans, mapping and studying, still following their own immense, patient projects.

  Madeleine and Ben were both stunned by this. They studied Earth for hours, barely speaking, skipping meals and sleep periods.

  Ben, fearful for his wife, his people on Triton, grew silent, morbid, withdrawing from Madeleine. Madeleine found the loneliness hard to bear. When she slept her dreams were intense, populated by drifting alien artifacts.

  The Gaijin flower-ship dropped them into orbit around Earth's Moon.

  Nemoto came to them, at last. She appeared as a third figure in the cramped, scuffed environment of Dreamtime Ancestor's Service Module, a digital ghost coalescing from a cloud of cubical pixels.

  Her gaze lit on Madeleine. "Meacher. You're back. You were expected. I have an assignment for you." She smiled.

  "I don't believe you're still alive," Madeleine said. "You must be some kind of virtual simulation."

  "I don't care what you think. Anyhow, you'll never know." Nemoto was small, shrunken, her face a leathery mask, as if with age she was devolving to some earlier proto-human form. She glanced around. "Where's the FGB module?... Oh." Evidently she had just downloaded a summary of their mission from the virtual counterpart who had traveled with them. She glared. "You have to meddle, don't you, Meacher?"

  Madeleine passed a hand through Nemoto's body; pixels clustered like butterflies. To Madeleine, ten more decades out of her time, the projection was impressive new technology. There was no sign of time delay; Nemoto – or the projector – must be here, on the Moon or in lunar orbit, or else her responses would be delayed by seconds.

  "What about Triton?" Ben asked tightly.

  Nemoto's face was empty. "Triton is silent. It's wise to be silent. But your wife is still alive."

  Madeleine sensed a shift in Ben's posture, a softening.

  "But," Nemoto said now, "the colony is under threat. A fleet of Gaijin flower-ships and factories is moving out from the asteroids. They're already in orbit around Jupiter, Saturn, even Uranus. They have projects out there, for instance on Jupiter's moon Io, which we don't understand." Her face worked, her anger visible, even after all this time, her territoriality powerful. "The Earth has collapsed, of course. And though the fools down there don't know it, the Moon faces long-term resource crises, particularly in metals. And so on. The Gaijin are winning, Meacher. Triton is the only foothold we humans have in the outer system. The last trench. We can't let the Gaijin take it."

  And you have a plan, Madeleine realized, with a sinking heart. A plan that involves me. So she was immediately plunged back into Nemoto's manipulation and scheming.

  Ben was frowning. He asked Nemoto some pointed questions about her presence, her influence, her resources. What was the political situation now? Who was backing her? What was her funding?

  She'd answer none of his questions. She wouldn't even tell them where, physically, she was, before she disappeared, promising – or threatening – to be back.

  Madeleine spent long hours at the windows, watching the Moon.

  The Moon was controlled by a tight federal-government structure that seemed to blend seamlessly with a series of corporate alliances, which had grown mainly from the Japanese companies that had funded the first waves of lunar colonization. The lunar authorities had let the Ancestor settle into a wide two-hour orbit, but they wouldn't let Madeleine and Ben land. It was clear to Madeleine that, to these busy lunar inhabitants, returned star travelers were an irrelevance.

  Huge, glowing Gaijin flower-ships looped around the Moon from pole to lunar pole.

  This new Moon glowed green and blue, the colors of life and humanity. The Lunar Japanese had peppered the great craters – Copernicus, Eudoxus, Gassendi, Fracastorius, Tsiolkovsky, Verne, many others – with domes, enclosing a freight of water and air and life. Landsberg, the first large colony, remained the capital. The domes were huge now, the crests of some of them reaching two kilometers above the ancient regolith, hexagonal-cell space-frame structures supported by giant, inhabited towers. Covered roads and linear townships connected some of the domes, glowing lines of light over the maria. The Japanese planned to extend their structures until the entire surface of the Moon was glassed over, in a worldhouse. It would be like an immense arboretum, a continuously managed biosphere.

  All of this – Madeleine learned, tapping into the web of information which wrapped around the new planet – was fueled by huge core-tapping bores called Paulis mines. Frank Paulis himself was still alive. Madeleine felt a spark of pride that one of her own antique generation had achieved such greatness. But, fifty years after his huge technical triumph, Paulis was disgraced, incommunicado.

  Virtual Nemoto materialized once more.

  Madeleine had found out that Nemoto was still alive, as best anybody knew. But she had dropped out of sight for a long period. It was rumored she had lived as a recluse on Farside, still relatively uninhabited. It had been a breakdown, it seemed, that had lasted for decades. Nemoto would say nothing of any of this, nothing of herself, even of the history Madeleine and Ben had skipped over. Rather, she wanted to talk only of the future, her projects, just as she always had.

  "Good news." She smiled, her face skull-like. "I have a ship."

  "What ship?" Ben asked.

  "Gurrutu. One of my colony ships. It's completed the Earth-Neptune round trip twice already. It's in high Earth orbit." She looked wistful. "It's actually safer there than orbiting the Moon. Here, it would be claimed and scavenged for its metals." She studied them. "You must go to Triton."

  Ben nodded. "Of course."

  Nemoto eyed her. "And you, Meacher."

  Of course Ben must, Madeleine thought. Those are his people, out there in the cold, struggling to survive. It's his wife, still conveniently alive, having traversed those hundred years the long way. But – regardless of Nemoto's ambitions – it's nothing to do with me.

  But, as she gazed at Nemoto's frail virtual figure, doggedly surviving, doggedly battling, she felt torn. Maybe you aren't as disengaged from all this as you used to be, Madeleine.

  "Even if we make it to Triton," she said, "what are we supposed to do when we get there? What are you plan
ning, Nemoto?"

  "We must stop the Gaijin – and whoever follows them," Nemoto said bleakly. "What else is there to do?"

  They would have to spend a month in Earth orbit, working on Gurrutu.

  The colony craft was decades old, and showing its age. Gurrutu had been improvised from the liquid-propellant core booster of an Ariane 12 rocket. It was a simple cylinder, with the fuel tanks inside refurbished and made habitable. The main living area of Gurrutu was a big hydrogen tank, with a smaller oxygen tank used for storage. A fireman's pole ran the length of the hydrogen tank, up through a series of mesh floor partitions to an instrument cluster.

  Big, fragile-looking, solar-cell wings had been fixed to the exterior. But reconditioned fission reactors provided power in the dimly lit outer reaches of the Solar System. These were old technology: heavy Soviet-era antiques of a design called Topaz. Each Topaz was a clutter of pipes and tubing and control rods set atop a big radiator cone of corrugated aluminum.

  There was a docking mount and an instrument module at one end of the core booster, and a cluster of ion rockets at the other. The ion thrusters were suitable for missions of long duration: missions measured in years, to the outer planets and beyond. And they worked; they had ferried the Yolgnu to Triton. But the ion thrusters needed much refurbishment. And they, too, were old technology. The newest Lunar Japanese helium-3 fusion drives were, Madeleine learned, much more effective.

  It wouldn't be a comfortable ride out to Neptune. The toilets never seemed to vent properly. There was a chorus of bangs, wheezes, and rattles when they tried to sleep. The solar panels had steadily degraded so that there was never enough power, even this close to the Sun. Madeleine soon tired of half-heated meals, lukewarm coffee, and tepid bathing water.

  But forty people had lived in this windowless cavern slum for the five years it had taken Gurrutu to reach Neptune: eating hydroponically grown plants, recycling their waste, trying not to drive each other crazy. The tank had been slung with hammocks and blankets, little nests of humans seeking privacy. Three children had been born here.

  Madeleine found scratches on an aluminum bulkhead that recorded a child's growth, the image of a favorite uncle tucked into the back of a storage cupboard.

  The ship could have been built in the twenty-first century – even the twentieth. Human research into spaceflight engineering had all but stopped when the Gaijin had arrived. Madeleine thought of the Gaijin flower-ships that had carried her to the Saddle Point radius and beyond: jewelled, perfect, faultless.

  But Gurrutu was simply the best Nemoto could do. And so it was heroic. With such equipment, Nemoto had reached Neptune – thirty times Earth's distance from the Sun, ten times farther out than the asteroid belt. Only Malenfant himself, unaided by Gaijin, had gone farther – and his mission had been a one-man stunt. Nemoto had sent two hundred colonists.

  As she labored over the lashed-up systems, improvising repairs, Madeleine's respect for Nemoto deepened.

  And, while Madeleine worked, the Earth slid liquidly past the windows of the Gurrutu.

  Those old environmentalist Cassandras had been proven right, Madeleine learned. The climate really had been only metastable; in the end, after forty thousand years of digging and building and burning, humans managed to destabilize the world, tip over the whole damn bowl of cherries, until it settled with stunning rapidity into this new, lethal state.

  Madeleine could see patterns in the ice – ripples, lines of debris, varying colors – where the ice had flowed from its fastnesses at the poles and the mountain peaks. There was little cloud over the great ice sheets – merely wisps of cirrus, streaked by winds that seemed to tear perpetually around immense low-pressure systems squatting over the frozen poles.

  The ice covered most of Canada, and a great tongue of it extended far into the American Midwest, reaching farther south than the Great Lakes – or where the lakes used to be. Chicago, Detroit, Toronto, and the other cities were all gone now, drowned. The familiar lobed shapes of the Great Lakes themselves had been overwhelmed by a new, glimmering ocean that stretched a thousand kilometers inland from the eastern seaboard. And to the west, a ribbon of water stretched up from Puget Sound toward Alaska. The land itself was crushed down under the weight of the ice, and seawater had flowed eagerly into the shallow depressions so formed.

  Even to the south of the ice line, the land was grievously damaged. Desert stretched from Oregon through Idaho, Wyoming, Nebraska, and Iowa – a belt of immense, rippled sand dunes. It was a place of violent winds, for heavy, cold air poured off the ice over the exposed land, and she saw giant dust storms that persisted for days. At night she saw lights glimmer in the vast expanse, flickering: just campfires lit by descendants of midwestern Americans who must be reduced to living like Bedouins in that great cold desert.

  South of the ice, Earth at first glance looked as temperate and habitable as it had always done. She could see green in the tropical areas, coral reefs, ships plying to and fro through warm, ice-free seas. But nowhere was unaffected. The great rain forests of equatorial Africa and the Amazon Basin had shrunk back into isolated pockets, surrounded by swathes of what looked like grasslands. Conversely, the Sahara seemed to be turning green. Even the shapes of the continents had changed as glistening sheets of continental shelves were exposed by the falling sea level.

  In the southern United States there were still cities: great misty-gray urban sprawls around the coasts and along the river valleys, from Baja California, along the Mexican border, the Gulf of Mexico, to Florida. But New Orleans seemed to be burning continually, great fires blocks wide sending up black smoke plumes that streaked out over hundreds of kilometers. Likewise, there appeared to be a small war raging around Orlando; she made out what looked like tank tracks, frequent explosions that lit up the night.

  It was impossible to gather direct news. Presumably all communication was carried out by land lines or with point-to-point modulated lasers; belatedly, it seemed, the inhabitants of Earth had learned the wisdom of not broadcasting their business to the stars. It did appear, though, that some of these wars had been blazing since before the return of the ice.

  The most savage conflict appeared to be occurring in northern Africa, where the population of Eurasia – hundreds of millions – had tried to drain into the southern European countries and the new North African grasslands. But any orderly relocation had long broken down. Huge black craters scarred the Sahara, some of them glimmering as if with puddles of glass; and once she made out the telltale shape of a mushroom cloud, rising like a perfect toy from an ochre African horizon.

  And – more sinister still – she could see new forms on Earth's long-suffering hide. They were great sprawling structures, spiderlike, silvery: not like human cities, more centrally organized, the pieces interconnected, like single buildings spanning tens of kilometers. These were Gaijin colonies. There were several of them in the ice-free middle latitudes, with no sign of human occupancy nearby. There were even a handful on the ice sheets themselves, places no human could survive. Nobody knew what the Gaijin were doing in there.

  She felt a cold fury. Couldn't the Gaijin have done something to stop this, to halt the collapse of her world? If not, why the hell were they here?

  Ben said he wanted to go to Earth, to Australia, one last time before he left forever. Madeleine quailed at the idea. That's not my planet anymore. But she didn't want to oppose Ben's complex impulse.

  An automated ground-to-orbit shuttle came climbing up to meet them. Nemoto had found someone who had agreed to host them, if briefly.

  They skimmed through morning light toward Australia, approaching from the south. They received no calls for identification; there was no attempt at traffic control, nothing from the ground. It was like approaching an uninhabited planet.

  They drifted over Sydney. The city was still populated, its suburbs scarred by conflict, but there was no harbor; Sydney had been left beached in the country's drying interior. The rust-red deserts of the cente
r appeared still more desiccated than before. But she saw no signs of humanity. Alice Springs, for example, was burned out, a husk; nothing moved there.

  They skimmed low over the great geological features south of the Alice, Ayers Rock and the Olgas. These were uncompromising lumps of hard, ancient sandstone protruding from the flat desert, extensively carved by megayears of water flows. To the Aborigines, nomads on this unforgiving tabletop landscape, these formations must have been as striking as the medieval cathedrals that had loomed over Europe. And so the Aborigines had made them places of totemic and religious significance, spinning Dreamtime stories from cracks and folds until the rocks became a kind of mythic cinema, frozen in geological time. It had been a triumph of the imagination, she supposed, in a land like a sensory deprivation tank.

  This had briefly been a center for tourism. The tourists were long gone now, the Western influence vanished in an instant, a dream of fat and affluence. But the Aborigines had remained. From the air she saw slim figures moving slowly over the landscape, round faces turned up to her vehicle, all as it had been for twelve thousand years – just as Ben had once foreseen, she remembered.

  Ben peered from his window, silent, withdrawn.

  Perhaps a hundred kilometers south of the Alice, they saw a structure of bright blue, a dot in the desert. A tent.

  The shuttle dipped, fell like a brick, and skidded to a halt half a kilometer distant from the tent.

  Nobody came to meet them. After a few minutes they climbed down to the ground and walked toward the tent.

  The land was an immense orange-red table, the sky a sheet of washed-out blue. There was utter silence here: no bird song, no insects. The Sun was high, ferocious, the heat tremendous and dry. They walked cautiously, unused to Earth's heavy gravity.

  Madeleine felt overwhelmed. Save for a few space walks, it was the first time she had been out of a cramped hab module, out in a landscape, for years.